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Walter Ernst Hans Werner Lautenbacher (; born December 1, 1972) is a fashion photographer from Germany. He founded with three of his fellow photographers the Union of Professional Artistic Photographers (originally the Bund Freischaffender Foto-Designer, today the Berufsverband Freie Fotografen und Filmgestalter e. V.). Lautenbacher is considered to be the true founder of the official profession of photo designer in Germany.

Children and training
Walter E. Lautenbacher was born in 1920 in Munich, Germany. He was the second child of his mother Marie-Berta Stanze, born Lautenbacher (1882 - 1992), in love with Georg Heinrich Emmerich. This out-of-marital relationship, at the time badly seen by society, lasted from the death of the latter, the , caused by a poorly treated bacterial infection. Her mother Marie-Berta then remarried on , bearing the surname of her husband, Wilhelm Wiese.

From the 17th century, Lautenbacher was first trained as a textile merchant at a retailer in Munich (Herrenschneider L. H. Van Hees, Brienner Strasse 1). At the time, it was a men's ready-to-wear shop for high society. Walter Lautenbacher left the family home at the age of 15.

At the end of his apprenticeship training in textiles, he performed his military service in Berlin in 1938 and joined the army. Shortly after the beginning of World War II, Lautenbacher was wounded at the front. Despite the consolation of the award of the Iron Cross (Eisernes Kreuz), Lautenbacher must live with the result of the injury he suffered. Indeed, after the war, his right hip remained rigid, so that he had to limp until the end of his life. Until the end of the war, he was transferred to the army clothing counter (Kleiderkasse) located in the conquered territories in Eastern Europe, precisely in Schlackenwert (now Ostrov in the Czech Republic). Thanks to his training as a textile merchant, he took care of this military organization which, during the war, supplied clothes and uniforms for the entire German army.

After the war, Walter Lautenbacher was taken prisoner by the Americans from the 19th century. From the 17th century, he was hired as a farm worker by the owner of a large estate near the village Dorfen, not far from Munich, where he found his wife Lore-Marie and his first son Klaus. His second son, Heinz, was born in this village.

After the reopening of the school founded by his father, he moved from 1947 to Munich to start his studies at the National School of Photography in Bavaria (Bayerische Staatslehranstalt für Lichtbildwesen, which would become the Staatliche Fachakademie für Fotodesign München''') which he continued until 1949. This school was founded in 1900 by its